Patience (operetta)

:This article refers to the Savoy Opera. For other meanings, see Patience (disambiguation).

Related Topics:
Savoy Opera - Patience (disambiguation)

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Patience, or Bunthorne's Bride, is a comic Gilbert and Sullivan operetta in two acts, with music by Arthur S. Sullivan and libretto by William S. Gilbert. First performed at the Opera Comique, London, on April 23, 1881, it moved to the 1292-seat Savoy Theatre on October 10, 1881, where it was the first theatre production in the world to be lit by electric light. Henceforth, the G&S comic operas would be known as the "Savoy Operas" and both fans and performers of G&S would come to be known as "Savoyards."

Related Topics:
Gilbert and Sullivan - Operetta - Arthur S. Sullivan - William S. Gilbert - Opera Comique - London - Savoy Theatre

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This comic opera is a satire upon the aesthetic movement of nineteenth-century England. In particular, many have accepted that the central character, Bunthorne, was intended to satirize Oscar Wilde, but this identification is probably retrospective: there is a better case that Reginald Bunthorne, a "Fleshly Poet", is based on Algernon Swinburne, who was more famous than Wilde in 1881 and who had been assailed for immorality by Robert Buchanan (under the pseudonym of Thomas Maitland) in an article called "The Fleshly School of Poetry", published in the Contemporary Review for October, 1871. While Gilbert may or may not have intended to satirize Swinburne, the makeup and costume adopted by the first Bunthorne, George Grossmith, used the hair style and monocle of the painter James McNeill Whistler, the velvet jacket of Swinburne and the knee-breeches of Wilde.

Related Topics:
Aesthetic movement - England - Oscar Wilde - Algernon Swinburne - Robert Buchanan - The Fleshly School of Poetry - Contemporary Review - October - 1871 - George Grossmith - James McNeill Whistler

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Impresario Richard D'Oyly Carte, who built the Savoy Theatre, partnered with G&S and served as producer of all the G&S shows, was also the booking manager for Oscar Wilde. It was he who despatched Oscar, in all the glory of his green carnation and knee-breeches, to New York and points west to enlighten Americans on the English Aesthetic Movement and, incidentally, to build up the box office for Patience. Wilde even agreed to attend one of the early performances of Patience, with suitable publicity arranged by Helen Lenoir, who would become the second Mrs. D'Oyly Carte.

Related Topics:
Impresario - Richard D'Oyly Carte

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Patience was originally conceived by W. S. Gilbert as a tale of rivalry between two curates and of the groupies who attended upon them. The plot and even some of the dialogue was lifted straight out of Gilbert's Bab Ballad The Rival Curates. Some remnants of that version survive in the final text of Patience. Bunthorne says of Grosvenor, "Your style is much too sanctified – your cut is too canonical!" Later, Grosvenor agrees to change his lifestyle by saying, "I do it on compulsion!" – the very words used by the Reverend Hopley Porter in the Ballad. During the course of writing the libretto, however, Gilbert took note of the criticism he had received for his very mild satirizing of a clergyman in The Sorcerer, and looked about for an alternate pair of rivals. The aesthetes proved to be a gift to topsy-turvydom.

Related Topics:
Bab Ballad - The Sorcerer

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